Creative Technology said Tuesday it has been awarded a patent for a user interface found in its portable media players and in competing devices, such as Apple Computer’s iPod.

The digital entertainment company said that on Aug. 9 it received U.S. Patent No. 6,928,433, described as “automatic hierarchical categorization of music by metadata.” Creative applied for the patent–which it has dubbed the “Zen Patent,” named for its Zen music player–on Jan. 5, 2001, thirteen months before Apple did it.

Conspiracy theory is a theory seeking to explain a disputed case or matter as a plot by a secret group or alliance rather than an individual or isolated act. How do you think Yahoo!, Microsoft and AOL will respond over the launch of Google Talk, instant messenger created by Google. Instant-messaging software from those companies is available for free, but it is an important moneymaking tool because it increases traffic to those sites, which in turn helps generate more advertising or subscription revenue. Also, as companies offer more news and entertainment on their sites, having a communications tool to deliver and distribute that content is increasingly important. But … there is a conspiracy theory.

It is rumoured that within the last few weeks, there appears to have been a meeting between MSN , Yahoo and AOL . They’d all been talking amongst themselves — and sparsely with each other — about how to respond to Google over Google Talk, but were still trying to make up their minds. Do you want to know the theory, read it through.

Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped wondered “how many spam blogs does Google have on their Blogspot server?”. Then he used the following URL: www.blogger.com/redirect/next_blog.pyra?navBar=true which brought him to a random blog each time he accessed it. The result is fantastic: 42% weblog on Google’s Blogspot are Splog.

According to FightSplog.com “Splog” is short for Spam Blog. Spam blogs are blogs that don’t provide any real content for users. They exist solely to game the search engines. These splogs may exist just to have links to other websites or, they may have ads on the blog itself. The content on splogs are auto-generated, either from some other source or a list of useless keywords.

I wonder why criminal always finds its way when we found a new technology? So, let us fight the spam blogs.

According to Slasdot.org NASA is preparing to send the New Horizons probe to Pluto. It will be the first earth device to get intimate with the icy planet. And you can be there too – or, at least, your name. NASA is asking everyone to send them their names, which will be attached in the space device. The New Horizons probe will be launched in January 2006 to explore Pluto and the Kuiper belt, in the outskirts of the Solar System. It is expected that the probe will return to earth in approximately 50 thousand years.”

The result is:

NEW HORIZONS MISSION
Shedding Light on Frontier Worlds

Certificate No. 266342

Most of WordPress users are now caught by a feeling of great happiness or euphoria. They are very happy because of WordPress.com, a hosted service provide by the creator of WordPress, the semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. As of late August, WordPress.com is still under beta testing and a few invites have been handed out to people inviting them to test drive the new site.

Lorelle VanFossen, a volunteer working on publicity and promotion as well as helping with the WordPress Codex and Forum , gives us a clear explanation about what can you do, or not do, with your WordPress.com site.

Although I have no invitation to create an account on WordPress.com, it seems I do not want to hunt or beg to others for an invitation. I am a lucky guy with no programming knowledge who is able to explore the advantages of WordPress. I think it is enough for me to have a weblog powered by WordPress and it is running well. I have to wait and be patience until the release of WordPress 1.6 and I will use that on my own server. I agree with Lorelle that when WordPress.com gets up and running, it will be very exciting. Let me wait and see…

Aleksey Gureev again updated his plugin. Now he called it Bookmarker. Bookmarker is simple plug-in which posts bookmarks to your social bookmarks services accounts automatically when you publish entries in WordPress. It is very convenient and efficient to promote your posts all over the web this way in addition to pinging blog repositories. Before now, you had to walk through these services and post the comments manually, but now everything has changed. Bookmarker does it for you!

Features:
* del.icio.us support
* Simpy support
* Ability to enable/disable any of supported services
* Posting bookmarks on entry publication

As usual, the intallation process is very easy. Go to his blog and find it. I hope you will love it as I do.

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as categories and other lists of weblog postings. A permalink is what another weblogger will use to refer to your article (or section), or how you might send a link to your story in an e-mail message. Especially when they are used to link to individual postings, once a story is posted, the URL to it should be permanent, and never change.

Which one is better dashes or underscores in permalinks (URLs) for search engine optimization? I have got the answer: dashes are better than underscores! Go find the explanations from Matt Cutt, one of Google’s famous Webmaster-liasons.

In an interview with BusinessWeek as quoted by BlogHerald.com, Chairman of Blogcn, Hu Zhiguang told that 60% of their blogger are female because “(Chinese) boys and men don’t have time to write very much. Girls are more emotional, more articulate about their feelings. Besides, a lot of boys are busy playing online games.” I don’t think that similar number will come up in Indonesia. Although there is no valid and exact number, I think more or less 60% Indonesian blogger are male. The inhabitans of Planet Terasi and ID-Gmail, Indonesian weblog aggregators, for example, are dominated by male.

What do you think?